Pics: Secretary Clinton in London Today

I have yet to find pictures from the state dinner, but from what was posted in the comments thread at today's schedule, a couple of Youtubes and the picture I included here, it is eminently clear that Mme. Secretary was as enchanting at the dinner as any princess who ever lived. Meanwhile, I have these few photos to share of HRC being her usual exquisitely photogenic self. Enjoy!

Video & Text: Secretary Clinton's Remarks at "Inclusive Finance: A Path to the MDGs" Luncheon

"Inclusive Finance: A Path to the MDGs" Luncheon

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State

Hemsley Hotel

New York City

September 22, 2010

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Well, it is a real pleasure to be here, and let me begin by thanking Princess Máxima for her leadership on this very important issue. And, Prime Minister, thank you for bringing together such a distinguished group. I also want to thank two members of our team, our Under Secretary Maria Otero and Assistant Secretary Jose Fernandez, for highlighting the importance of financial inclusion. And thanks especially to President Lobo of Honduras and Foreign Minister Martinez of El Salvador for joining me today and then meeting with all of you to launch an innovative initiative that will advance both financial inclusion and financing for development in their two countries. And we hope when we get it off the ground and operating, that it may well serve as a model for similar efforts elsewhere.

Because like so many of you, I see in my travels across the world that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. And we are here at this very important event to highlight one of the biggest obstacles to making the most of everyone’s talents and their hard work; namely, a financial system that leaves out some 3 billion people, many of them women, rural farmers, small business owners, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities. Most of us in the developed world take the financial system for granted, whether it’s easy access to credit or a safe place to deposit our money. But without a bank account, parents can’t save for a child’s education. Without loans, small farmers can’t buy fertilizer for the start of the growing season, and entrepreneurs can’t expand and grow their businesses. And when people cannot participate in the formal economy, they often are taken advantage of, they are often left without recourse, and the effects of that undermine their own ambitions and hopes for families, communities, and even countries.

But thanks to many of you in this room, and thanks especially to Her Highness for highlighting this important issue, we’re finally getting the attention on the role that financial inclusion should play in alleviating poverty and in improving economic opportunity. We are building on the lessons learned from the success of microfinance: the poor are actually credit-worthy; they are reliable and they can help drive development if given the chance. And they can, if we work with them, be part of growing the financial system.

Now, many countries and institutions have developed promising ideas. For example, by updating some of its banking regulations, Kenya’s Central Bank helped spark the expansion of the most successful mobile phone banking program in the world, giving 8 million low-income Kenyans the tools to begin saving and building that better life. Brazil now allows street-corner kiosks to process financial transactions, so that financial services are no longer confined to bricks-and-mortar banks in big cities. And the G-20 is studying ways to advance financial inclusion and will be making recommendations this November in Seoul.

Now, we in the Obama Administration have made financial inclusion a priority. Last year, President Obama announced a new Microfinance Growth Fund, which has committed more than $100 million to provide credit to individuals and small businesses, especially those run by women. Beyond that, we are encouraging partnerships to open up new opportunities for mobile banking. We are supporting innovations like secured-transaction reform, so that small businesses can use movable assets, like the tailor his sewing machine, or the farmer her tractor, as collateral for loans – something that is not permitted by a lot of formal banks throughout this hemisphere and elsewhere. We are also supporting consumer-protection efforts, so that we can protect the newly banked from becoming victims of predatory lending practices.

Now, each of these ideas is based on the principles that underlie our development work. First, the initiatives must be led by the countries that will benefit from them, because we believe that’s the only way you can get initiatives to become sustainable and really part of the fabric of a society’s economy. They also will bring together partners from a wide range of fields, because there’s a lot of expertise that is still too stove-piped; it’s not adequately shared across sectors. And they are designed to spur long-term economic growth.

The initiative that we are launching today is called BRIDGE, which stands for Building Remittance Investment for Development, Growth, and Entrepreneurship. BRIDGE is a partner between our development agency, USAID, our U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, OPIC, and the Inter-American Development Bank. It demonstrates one of the benefits of actually bringing more people into the financial system. And it reflects the vision of President Lobo and President Funes of their countries and governments. In partnering with us on BRIDGE today, both leaders in Honduras and El Salvador have shown a commitment to advancing financial inclusion.

And here’s how it works. Every year, millions – actually, tens of millions – of people around the world leave home to find work. They settle in countries where they think they have a better economic future, then they begin sending money back home. And they send it to their families for all kinds of purposes. Now, if they send these remittances through the formal financial system, they create huge funding flows that are orders of magnitude larger than any development assistance we can dream of. By harnessing the potential of remittances, BRIDGE will make it easier for communities in El Salvador and Honduras to get the financing they need to build roads and bridges, for example, to support entrepreneurs, to make loans, to bring more people into the financial system.

Through BRIDGE and its in-country partners, local banks will be able to leverage their remittance flows. This is similar to what our banks do with the money we deposit in our accounts: They use it to make loans and raise capital, but it’s always there for you to take out if you need it.

With the leverage from remittances, the local banks will be able to get lower-cost, longer-term financing for investments in infrastructure projects and small businesses. Nothing changes for the people sending or receiving the remittances, and their money should never be at risk. But because the money is moving through the formal financial system, the local banks can use it to secure financing for development projects that will benefit entire communities.

This is one of the examples of the power of financial inclusion. But to make the most of that, we all have to contribute and stay committed. I have worked on financial inclusion for about 20 years, and I’m always trying to convince bankers in the formal banking system that poor people are actually good credit risks. We now have a lot of evidence of that. In fact, we have, some might argue, better evidence for poor people than rich people. (Laughter.)

So I would hope that we would start being creative about how to bank the unbanked. It is a win-win if it is pursued. Some bankers argue, oh, but the amounts are so small, the transactional costs are so great. But with technology and all that it brings, there certainly are ways of both expediting that and decreasing the costs.

So we are very excited about this partnership that the United States is announcing today with the governments and people of two of our neighbors, Honduras and of El Salvador. And I’d now like to introduce you to the president of Honduras, someone who has brought his country back to a very stable basis, who is working hard to bridge all of the development gaps that exist for the people of Honduras, and is very committed to the sustainable economic growth and therefore the greater opportunity for the Honduran people. Please join me in welcoming President Lobo. (Applause.)

Hillary Clinton: Al Fresco in Tblisi

While we wait for whatever news and photos are released from her day with Bibi, I thought I would share these from yesterday when Secretary Clinton took a nice walk through Tblisi. President Saakashvili and Mayor Ugulava inroduced her to Georgian wine and their views of the Caspian Sea. Beautiful views, nice reception among the population for the beautiful SOS.

Secretary Clinton's Interview With Margaret Warner of PBS: Transcript/Link to video

Stunningly, the State Department seems not to have rights to this video either. But here is the link to the interview. There is a little lead up, but worth the wait.

Interview With Margaret Warner of PBS

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State

NATO Headquarters

Brussels, Belgium

December 4, 2009

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QUESTION: Madame Secretary, thanks for doing this.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you, Margaret.

QUESTION: Was this a hard sell to get the NATO allies to pony up more troops?

SECRETARY CLINTON: It wasn’t a hard sell, once the hard part was over; namely, getting the strategy, feeling that we had done everything we needed to do to make the very best assessment, to give the President our best advice, and the decision that he then announced on Tuesday night. Once he announced that decision, it was extraordinary the kind of support that we were getting from our friends and allies around the world.

QUESTION: Now, you said yesterday on the plane that you acknowledged there’d been some misunderstanding about what the July 2011 date really meant. Did you – on the Hill, I mean. Did you find the same misunderstanding here?

SECRETARY CLINTON: I really didn’t. Maybe it’s because it all got explained over the last 48 hours, and the President’s point in the speech that we needed a responsible withdrawal based on conditions, that we weren’t talking about jumping off a cliff, but to having a transition. By the time I got here, and the reports that I had heard from others, is people understood what we were talking about and actually appreciate it because they thought it helped to focus everybody’s mind and attention. I think it helped in some of the countries that we were asking for additional help, because they could go in and say, look, we have a new strategy, the United States is committed to this strategy, we think we’ll be able to start making transitions in 2011. I think it all added up to a strong argument for being part of it.

QUESTION: So it was reassuring to some of these partners that President Obama was saying this isn’t just an endless open-end commitment?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes, it was very reassuring. And when President Karzai said yesterday in an interview that he saw it as an impetus, that’s exactly what we were hoping for, that it was the opportunity for us to show both resolve and urgency. And I think we’ve succeeded in doing that.

QUESTION: Now, I have to ask you about the 7,000 additional troops, which the Secretary General announced this morning to us, and everyone put on their websites. But how many of those are really new troops versus troops that, say, came in for the election and now are going to stay on?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Margaret, they are all new, in the sense that they will all be in Afghanistan in 2010. The troops that came in for the election were expected to have left by the end of this year. They have decided, pursuant to the new strategy, that they’re going to be staying. And we have thousands of new commitments from countries that have made a real stretch, like small countries like Georgia and Slovakia, big countries like Italy and Poland and the United Kingdom, and others who will be making their announcements over the next days and weeks.

This was actually not supposed to be a pledging conference. This was supposed to be a rallying conference in the sense of people getting behind the policy with public statements, and then there’ll be a force determination conference next week. But I was thrilled that we got these kind of commitments out there today.

QUESTION: Let’s take the British, for example. Gordon Brown, Prime Minister Brown, announced 500 new troops; that’s what the convention wisdom has been. But the Brits are saying, oh no, you count our level from back before the election, we’re 1,200 troops.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And that’s true. I mean, we all put in more troops for the election, and that was the rationale. It was not part of the new strategy. It was just to try to provide enough security so that we could get people to the polls. But it was very clear from many of our friends, they said, okay, fine, we’re gonna do this, but our people are against this, our governments are not happy with this, so you have to understand, we’re putting them in, we’re taking them out. And now they’re saying, hey, wait a minute, we’ve reconsidered, we’re going to stay.

QUESTION: Now, what about the French? President Sarkozy said no additional French troops. Is he saying anything differently privately?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I’m with the Secretary General, who was at an event with me earlier today and was asked exactly that question. And he smiled and he said, well, actually I think there’s a little potential room here for some additional help.

I don’t know that other than to look to the strong verbal support that the French have given us, both the foreign minister to me, the president to President Obama. And they do have significant numbers there now, but we hope that they’ll come forward.

QUESTION: Now, the other significant – the other major contributor currently, the number three contributor, is the Germans. Are you perfectly comfortable with them saying they’re not going to make any decision until after the late January Afghan conference?

SECRETARY CLINTON: I am, and for this reason. First, they have just stood up a new government. This is an entirely different coalition. And I know when it’s like when you’re all in one party – (laughter) – and all of a sudden you’re in a new government. You have to figure out who’s on first and then who’s calling the shots. So it doesn’t at all concern me. They have to be sure that they know what they’re doing going forward.

And the conference at the end of January is very important to Chancellor Merkel. I believe that we’re going to be seeing more assistance from Germany, but they want to do it in accordance to their own political schedule.

QUESTION: Let me finally ask you about the response in the region. The stories today were that it was really not met – this Obama speech – with great enthusiasm in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Let me ask you about Pakistan first. There, there was just a lot of talk about the United States was getting ready to walk out on Pakistan once again. Are you surprised by this?

SECRETARY CLINTON: No, not after the three days I just spent in Pakistan. I think that there is just a reflex of skepticism and anxiety about American intentions, and it goes back into the history of this quite young country. It’s about the same age I am. They look to these historical milestones and say, well, America wasn’t with us then and America left us after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan. So as I said repeatedly when we were there, we have to rebuild trust.

But I think if you read those stories closely, and certainly the personal conversations I’ve had with Pakistani leaders in the last couple of days, there’s a sigh of relief. There’s a feeling that, okay, so the United States is committed not only to Afghanistan in the fight against the Afghan Taliban, but you’re committed to this partnership you keep talking about. We have set up a strategic dialogue between the United States and Pakistan. It’s very important to them. And we’re going to continue to forge ahead. And I think we’re making a little progress. I actually thought the press accounts were better than I would have anticipated. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Starting from a very low base. And finally, in Afghanistan and President Karzai, he gave an inaugural speech, he talked about improving governance. Have you seen evidence that he’s making good on those pledges, particularly in the area of tamping down corruption?

SECRETARY CLINTON: We’ve seen some promising signs. It’s probably too early to draw some overall conclusions, but I am encouraged. I think he has said a lot of the right things, not only in his speech, but in some of his comments since then. There seems to be a real appreciation of the new strategy and the partnership between Afghanistan and the United States and our allies, and particularly the way that General McChrystal is going about implementing the strategy. So I am really reassured that we may be on a new path.

QUESTION: But would you say he has quite a ways to go to create a record that, when this Afghan conference is held at the end of January, the Europeans are going to look and say he is stepping up?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think we all have a ways to go. This is not just a one-way street. I think that some of the decisions we all have made have contributed to the very problems that we now wish to solve. So everybody is going to have to up their game. They’re all – we’re all going to have to learn the lessons of the past. We’re going to have to be better prepared to deal with the realities we confront in Afghanistan. I think they’re making an effort, and we’re certainly redoubling ours. And so I think we’ll see progress.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, thank you.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you.

I was so right!

This is what she she wore - and it is my favorite! Turn around, Hillary! Let us see you from the front! Gorgeous!